


judas kissed

by lostamongstars



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Plot Twists, Weird Plot Shit, irdk what i did here but it was not nice apparently, my gift to a friend back on Wattpad last Christmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-22 20:03:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6092422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostamongstars/pseuds/lostamongstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life wouldn't be life without love, a little blood, and betrayal. That's something Nico knows but he never really realizes it until the unwavering truth such as that bites his face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	judas kissed

**\+ a/n: vague fic (sorta) + implied bxb. cover at the media! my thing for the #PJOSecretSanta2015, a gift to the amazing Percy ;) which I hoped I'd poured more effort in, tbh. (This was all my brain could produce in horror/angst. Forgive me. ;-;) I hope you like it, nonetheless! :')**

—

 ** _T_** he song in Nico di Angelo's head is a scream, going again and again in a loop. It is his own.

Before him, the lady cracks a whip.

Strike.

Scream.

Strike.

Scream.

Repeat.

He's lost count at twelve. Always at the twelfth. Or rather, he wills himself to stop counting the times the whip hits his torso, cracking his skin apart like claws. He knows this. He feels it. The whip has barbed protrusions at its sides, and it breaks his skin open, tears his flesh apart.

On the floor his blood shines like her eyes. The glistening rubies fall in a slow trickle. How he wishes hers will fall, too—her own rubies, her eyes, her blood. His blood is warm on his skin, slick. It sticks but never had he felt uncomfortable. Never felt cold nor hot in here. There is only the blinding white filling the room, making the room seem to go on forever on his sides.

In the white room, unnamed, unmarked, unknown; there he stays. No one knows where he is. No one knows how long he's staying here.

No one is there but him and the bloody lady. No one, no one, no one, no one, no one—

She leaves. Nothing happens after then. Well, except for the fact that his body heals in itself and the rubies disappear. He feels the skin closing. The itches start soon thereafter. Scabs. Long, and too many. More so than the ones he reaped in the numerous battles he waged in the past. With his hands in thick shackles moored in the walls, he cannot satisfy the need to scratch the itch.

Soon, it drives the slightest of his mind insane. The itch that cannot be scratched. The will to go out of the door but cannot. Bound to this chains. And Nico only stops himself short before thinking—

—this might be forever.

Aside from the lady, the boy with eyes of Greek fire dressed in a spotless whitesuit go inside the room. He checks on him. Feeds him. Wipes the stains on his torso. Sometimes he changes his clothes: always the same ratty black jeans and undergarments. At that point, he only draws his head down, averting as if to give Nico a strange, delicate decency.

Boys are boys, and I am one. Do I need that? Nico asks himself most of the time. Stripped off of glory and defiance, yet here's this boy. This boy with the Greek fire eyes.

Sometimes Nico's given a shirt but it isn't a good idea at all. It only sticks after the whips do their part, and it was terribly messy and stinging Nico when the other boy removes them with hi nimble hands.

Sometimes the other boy goes as far as becoming Nico's new hands, scratching the itches, mussing his hair and pleasing him if the tied boy so much as tries to caress the other's cheeks with his own. Desperate for human touch that isn't all hurt, hurt, hurt. Those Greek fire eyes resisted—Nico could read that much from the ways he'd acted acted—but soon he fell with Nico. A kiss, a lick, his hands everywhere, gripping Nico's sanity back from the void the way a mortal would pull a kite down from the skies.

If it's genuine love the other boy feels, or only for manly pleasure, or if there's something else darker beneath, Nico himself hasn't bothered pondering.

Because he has found comfort in the whitewashed piece of Hell.

He isn't so bad, Nico finds—assumes, most like—at day three. He does what Nico says—well, what Nico pleads with the use of his lame body language, that is. He takes care of him after the lady claims her two-hour whipping fiesta. Nico knows no names, only his own. He does know something else, though.

The boy has no reason to be here, yet he is. He's too good to be here with the Ruby Lady who gives him an arsenal of hurt at the days that pass. So far, he's been hit for eleven times, counting today's as well. Eleven days had already passed.

The outside world might have sensed that he's off the grid. MIA. Marooned. But then again, Nico has always been. The son of Hades, too much of a hermit and never opens up.

It strikes him that only with this boy in front of him—this boy with the eyes that said he can both good and bad and neither of the two—does Nico let him in in his frustrations. The unspoken fears run between the space of their bodies, connected by a silver cord. He's felt Nico, and likewise.

"We're not so different, you and I."

The voice makes Nico jump. He's spoken. He's too detached to ever remember how it sounds, only that Nico likes it.

"What do you mean...?" Nico's voice is soft, hoarse from the song composed from his screams.

But he's not speaking anymore. After dressing him again in the same article of clothing, the boy with Greek fire in his eyes slips out of the room.

Gone. Just like that. Nico feels disappointment. Then stupidity aiming at himself because he feels disappointed. The other boy can speak, all right, but what if those seven words accosts him with something similar to Nico's?

The next day, Nico's captor talks to him. A surprising development.

"So I see you've talked with Hecate's pet," she speaks liltingly.

Strike.

Nico doesn't scream. Doesn't let his lips budge in the thin, wry line he's built. Too late to drop the strong facade. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late.

Ruby (he's decided to call her that) cracks the whip to the floor. His blood, his own rubies, paints a curved streak on the sterile grounds.

"Oh." She chuckles. "You've toughen up, sugar?"

Nico says nothing.

Ruby wraps parts of the whip to her right hand. Her own rubies trickle but she looks less than disturbed. She slaps Nico's left cheek with it.

He cries out. Tears sting his gash.

She laughs. Continues what she started, doing it on his right cheek.

And repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Nico turns into a mess of blood and tears, salt and lukewarm liquids mixing in his mouth. He's shaking in his shackles. He can't feel his legs.

She licks the whip with her tongue. His rubies slide down her chin and mouth. "Oh, do I love doing this job. Nothing feels as better as this! But sad to say, we have to free you now. We already have what we want from you."

His words are too silent. The wounds are closing up. "What do you mean, you now have what you want?"

"Blood. More than enough, really. I told Mother that seven days was enough, but oh—" She bursts into a middle grader giggle, the annoying sound girls make when they talk about crushes or do something snarky (with a boy) at the graveyard. "She said, 'Go on and have fun with him, dear. Get some more blood! He's stronger than the other two, see?' Your screams are a wonderful bonus, though. I've compiled them in a CD. Daddy E would love that."

"Who are you?"

"Have you not remembered?"

Nico couldn't shake his head. The sides of his face still hurt, but at least they're healing.

"Cant blame you. Everyone likes to forget what happens in the Pit. What do the mortals call it, sugar? 'What happens in the Pit, stays in the Pit'?"

"Sounds like." Deep down, spiders are crawling to his heart.

"Well, we have more than enough of you, see. So we don't need you anymore. The two others won't be so lucky, though. They're fairly... hmm, say, of more importance. Not that you are not important, sugar—that's we took most blood from you. Them? They'll end up here just like you! They entertain Mother alot, see. And while I've gotten so carried away, we've wasted enough time to be sorry for it."

So what happens next, was what he wants to ask, but he can't say them out loud. His mind muddled with all the words she says in that staccato-like report. Ruby must have read his mind.

"Well, tomorrow, you're leaving."

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

He's free.

Nico might have celebrated with the faintest, littlest smile. He can't. Can't. Can't. Can't. His jaw might fall any moment from its hinges. He's healing, but why is he feeling like this? Is there something wrong?

"Oh, it's just your body, sugar," Ruby assured. "You'd be so fine once you wake up."

Nico might not even wake up. Hades, he's hurt, so hurt he almost asks Ruby to kill him now.

Ruby steps closer. Closer. Closing the inches until Ruby has his chin on her fingers. Her nails dig like incisors on his skin. His vision darkens, but he still has his ears.

"His name," she whispers, cold breath ghosting on his lips, "is Alabaster."

The next day, Nico's wounds are completely gone and he has returned. His head is clear, body clean and perfectly functioning. Alabaster stands with him at the mortal base of Half-Blood Hill, antsy, wariness in his eyes.

"I don't belong there."

Nico asks the question for the nth time. "Why not?"

"I don't belong there."

But Nico pulls him anyway, and they start hiking.

Campers fuss over him. The first time in months. He's not used to it. The Hecate siblings have hands on their mouths, recognizing the boy with Greek fire in his eyes as their eldest brother. The strongest. The alpha. Chiron towers over them in his centaur form, heads straight for Alabaster with dark, knowing look on his face. Before Alabaster heads with the activities director, he manages a look at Nico.

It's the look of goodbye, of regret. His chest aches, constricts. Nico feels like he's about to sway and fall.

 _I'm sorry_ , Nico imagined him saying. _I'm sorry._

Percy then comes to the picture, breaking the strange foreboding look both boys share. He shakes Nico's shoulder, his eyes wide and screaming so many things but all he says is: "Gods, Nico! Where have you been?"

"I've been taken," he replies, gravelly. "By some entity from the... from the Pit."

The campfire that night is filled with long shadows. Alabaster has yet to appear outside the Big House. He doesn't show up on dinner, either.

He could've sat with his siblings...

No one talks about his captors. The Pit shuts them up real quick, see. The Hunters are staying in camp thanks to Nico's capture, also thanks to Hades' insistence and who has ever dared challenging him?

"What do you mean you don't know how you got kidnapped?" Thalia asks for who knows how many times already.

"I don't remember. Honest." He doesn't. It's like someone swiped his memories from last week. Not impossible with the Mist, though. Piper and Leo once fell onto that ditch. He tells all that he remembers.

"There's that matter about you telling us that, well." Percy purses his lips. "You're not the last one."

Nico nods.

He's not the last. _Not the last_. The spiders start crawling inside him again and they're getting dangerously close. So close he can feel that itch in his apex.

They don't try talking anymore about it, resorting to telling the campers to stick to their siblings. No breaking the curfews. No intercabin visits at night. Not yet, until the veterans know what they're facing.

Nico retreats to his cabin. Closes his eyes.

His song echoes. The white room. Ruby. Eris. Ruby. Eris. Ruby. Eris.

Have you not remembered?

Ruby.

Eris.

Eris.

Ruby.

Her and she. She and her. One.

Then Alabaster: _sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry_. He mouths sorry to him. To Nico. The blood-encrusted child in chains. There's something else, too.

But then he wakes, heaving, clutching at his chest. His eyes dart around. He gets out of his soft bed and opens the door—

—only to find the whole world drowning in the early morning light behind the low-lying clouds and the campers calling out names.

The names they shout at the wind are Percy's and Thalia's.

Annabeth cries at the stones of the campfire, stone-faced beneath that curtain of tears, gray eyes burning through.

Nico only stands by the frame of his cabin's door, petrified. The spiders scratch. He's itching all over.

Chiron meets with Lou Ellen not too far from Nico's cabin. The girl looks like she's about to collapse, paler than what he remembers. He orders his feet to walk towards them.

_Walk, you stupid, oblivious git._

_I'm sorry_ , Alabaster's eyes had said. _I'm sorry._

_Walk._

_Walk._

_Walk._

"—this dream," she gushes out like a sprout of water from a busted pipe. "Mother and Alabaster, both saying sorry—"

"Calm down, my child," Chiron says, taking notice of Nico. "Tell us,slowly."

Nico sinks to his knees as he hears her speak. It's just as cryptic as Nico's time in the damn room, but one thing is clear. The spiders are feasting on his heart.

Alabaster, the boy who gave him comfort in Hell, has whisked both Percy and Thalia away to Tartarus.


End file.
